If you have any interest in SGI’s IRIX or used IRIX back when it was still current, you’re undoubtedly aware of Nekoware, a collection of freeware for IRIX, maintained and kept up-to-date as much as possible. After stagnating in 2015 and a few failed restarts and some infighting (apparently), the project finally relaunched somewhere last year, and a new quarterly release was pushed out.
Nekoware 2025Q4 is a clean break from previous releases, and requires that users fully remove any traces of previous installations. It contains the kinds of packages these freeware/open source collections for classic UNIX tended to contain: tons of common open source libraries, command-line tools, and more, including a few emulators. You’ll need IRIX 6.5.21 or newer, running on at least a MIPS R5000 processor-equipped SGI machine.
Planning for and work on the next release is already underway, and a brand new Nekoware SDK has been released as well, which provides bootstrap functionality and addresses the problem of having to build Nekoware on unstable IRIX environments. Seeing Nekoware resurrected is great news for the surprisingly active IRIX community.
As a HP-UX user, I feel some envy.
Requires MIPS IV unfortunately, so it will not work on my SGI Indy. Too bad.
There is also SGUG-RSE which, while incredibly poorly documented, I believe contains more software:
https://github.com/sgidevnet/sgug-rse
unfortunately the R4x00 are too long in the tooth to run any modern stuff. I think I also have an old indy somewhere.
the sgi users group has a good list of Irix SW resources, if you haven’t seen it already:
https://forums.sgi.sh/index.php?forums/software.4/
there are some archives with more “classic” (read ancient) freeware versions for IRIX.
https://jupiterrise.com/tgcware/tgcware.irix.html
https://ftp.zx.net.nz/pub/archive/sgi-freeware/index-by-alpha.html
The craziest thing about it to me is that the current sole maintainer is a locksmith by trade who got tired of IT work and maintains Nekoware as a labor of love.
Not only that, he worked very hard to archive as much as possible from the old original Nekochan and gather together as many as the old folks as possible.
I haven’t been hanging around lately (life’s been tough), but the community is nice.
I have huge respect for IRIX. It brought us XFS which is currently one of the best classical filesystems in Linux! I have never used IRIX myself, but I know for a fact that most/all? visual effects in the movie The Matrix were done on IRIX machines!
Too bad the Nekochan forum (that vanished one day) isn’t coming back… so much information about SGI and Sun workstations, only very partially archived by Web Archive. Someone even disassembled a Sun Graphics Tower and took detailed photos of all the chips inside. Didn’t save the photos (I know, I should’ve), but I remember there were lots of chips.
The infuriating is that the person owning the Nekochan forum just pulled the plug one day (purportedly because he didn’t have the resources to make the website GDPR-compliant), and that was it. No archive dump, no effort to pass ownership to someone else, nothing. So, the information still exists on a harddrive, it’s just that the owner of said harddrive is a total twat.
That was a great forum, and I actually knew personally the dude who ran it.
Your post illustrates perfectly some of the reasons he gave for his decision. At some point, the risk of being sued by an IP holder, on top of having to deal with a few ill adjusted weirdos, was just not worth it for him.
Hi miss mi old O2 and Fuel too much.
Unfotunately I had to move to other city, twice in two decades, and I had to pass on that fantastic stuff to an old friend.